Alt Dot Energy

The Prospects for Solar Thermal Worldwide

khalifa saber — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:01:48 +0000

As concerns about climate change and energy security escalate, as government incentives for harnessing solar energy expand, and as these costs decline while those of fossil fuels rise the harnessing of solar energy is expanding on every front . One of the solar technologies that is really beginning to take off is the use of solar thermal collectors to convert sunlight into heat that can be used to warm both water and space.

China, for example, is now home to 27 million rooftop solar water heaters. With nearly 4,000 Chinese companies manufacturing these devices, this relatively simple low-cost technology has leapfrogged into villages that do not yet have electricity. For as little as $200, villagers can have a rooftop solar collector installed and take their first hot shower.

This technology is sweeping China like wildfire, already approaching market saturation in some communities. Beijing plans to boost the current 114 million square meters of rooftop solar collectors for heating water to 300 million by 2020.

The energy harnessed by these installations in China is equal to the electricity generated by 49 coal-fired power plants. Other developing countries such as India and Brazil may also soon see millions of households turning to this inexpensive water heating technology. This leapfrogging into rural areas without an electricity grid is similar to the way cell phones bypassed the traditional fixed-line grid, providing services to millions of people who would still be on waiting lists if they had relied on traditional phone lines. Once the initial installment cost of rooftop solar water heaters is paid, the hot water is essentially free.

In Europe, where energy costs are relatively high, rooftop solar water heaters are also spreading fast. In Austria, 15 percent of all households now rely on them for hot water. And, as in China, in some Austrian villages nearly all homes have rooftop collectors. Germany is also forging ahead. Janet Sawin of the Worldwatch Institute notes that some 2 million Germans are now living in homes where water and space are both heated by rooftop solar systems.

Inspired by the rapid adoption of rooftop water and space heaters in Europe in recent years, the European Solar Thermal Industry Federation has established an ambitious goal of 500 million square meters, or 1 square meter of rooftop collector for every European by 2020—a goal slightly greater than the 0.93 square meters per person found today in Cyprus, the world leader. Most installations are projected to be Solar-Combi systems that are engineered to heat both water and space.

Europe’s solar collectors are concentrated in Germany, Austria, and Greece, with France and Spain also beginning to mobilize. Spain’s initiative was boosted by a March 2006 mandate requiring installation of collectors on all new or renovated buildings. Although to be truly effective the mandate needs to be enforced and this has not been the case thus far. Portugal followed quickly with its own mandate. The introduction of government subsidies has also increased the market penetration of solar thermal in Spain. ESTIF estimates that the European Union has a long-term potential of developing 1,200 thermal gigawatts of solar water and space heating, which means that the sun could meet most of Europe’s low-temperature heating needs.

The U.S. rooftop solar water heating industry has historically concentrated on a niche market—selling and marketing 10 million square meters of solar water heaters for swimming pools between 1995 and 2005. Given this base, however, the industry was poised to mass-market residential solar water and space heating systems when federal tax credits were introduced in 2006. Led by Hawaii, California, and Florida, U.S. installation of these systems tripled in 2006 and has continued at a rapid pace since then.

We now have the data to make some global projections. With China setting a goal of 300 million square meters of solar water heating capacity by 2020, and ESTIF’s goal of 500 million square meters for Europe by 2020, a U.S. installation of 300 million square meters by 2020 is certainly within reach given the recently adopted tax incentives. Japan, which now has 7 million square meters of rooftop solar collectors heating water but which imports virtually all its fossil fuels, could easily reach 80 million square meters by 2020.

If China and the European Union achieve their goals and Japan and the United States reach the projected adoptions, they will have a combined total of 1,180 million square meters of water and space heating capacity by 2020. With appropriate assumptions for developing countries other than China, the global total in 2020 could exceed 1.5 billion square meters.

This would give the world a solar thermal capacity by 2020 of 1,100 thermal gigawatts, the equivalent of 690 coal-fired power plants. This would account for more than half of the Earth Policy Institute’s renewable energy heating goal for 2020, part of a massive effort to stabilize our rapidly changing climate by slashing global net carbon emissions 80 percent within the next decade.

The huge projected expansion in solar water and space heating in industrial countries could close some existing coal-fired power plants and reduce natural gas use, as solar water heaters replace electric and gas water heaters. In countries such as China and India, however, solar water heaters will simply reduce the need for new coal-fired power plants.

Solar water and space heaters in Europe and China have a strong economic appeal. On average, in industrial countries these systems pay for themselves from electricity savings in fewer than 10 years. They are also responsive to energy security and climate change concerns.

With the cost of rooftop heating systems declining, particularly in China, many other countries will likely join Israel, Spain, and Portugal in mandating that all new buildings incorporate rooftop solar water heaters. No longer a passing fad, these rooftop appliances are fast entering the mainstream.

Electric Cars Store Power for the Grid

khalifa saber — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 14:40:10 +0000

V2G technology or Vehicle-to-grid, would enable electric car owners to make money while storing power for the grid. The technology was unveiled at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego yesterday.

Electricity grids that are fed by increasing amounts renewable energy could operate much more efficiently if they tapped into the vast amounts of power stored in the batteries of electric and hybrid vehicles, to balance out fluctuations in supply and demand.

The first experimental V2G system has just gone live at the University of Delaware, where three electric cars are connected to the grid whenever they are not being driven.

“They are making $5-$10 a day just by being plugged in,” said Kenneth Huber, technology manager for the PJM grid , which covers the mid-Atlantic states in the US. The two-way connection not only pulls in power to recharge the battery but also sends electricity to the grid.

On September 21, 2009, Delaware’s Governor Jack A. Markell signed Senate Bill 153, making it law for electric utilities to compensate owners of electric cars for electricity sent back to the grid at the same rate they pay for electricity to charge the battery. This is the first legislation of it’s kind in the world.

V2G vehicles work like an electrical sponge, cap-able of absorbing excess energy when demand is low, and returning some to the electric grid when demand is high, said Willett Kempton, project leader at the University of Delaware .

This sort of load balancing will become increasingly important as renew-able energy sources generate more electricity.

“Vehicles we have now provide freedom and meet the needs of individuals,” said Jeff Stein, an engineering professor and V2G researcher at the University of Michigan. “Hybrid and electric vehicles can also be used in a completely different way.”

Prof Kempton says his project suggests that an investment in V2G technology could pay off quickly for an electric car owner. Once the technology is commercialised, the additional costs of fitting a V2Genabled battery and charging system would be about $1,500 - and the owner could make $3,000 a year through a load-balancing contract with the grid.

The idea of using electric vehicles to make the grid more efficient has been under serious academic and governmental study for at least several years, and projects are now getting under way in the United States and other countries to examine not just V2G technologies, but also the use of batteries to store solar electricity, a third component of the V2G equation.

In January, the U.S. solar company Suniva announced an agreement with GS Battery USA to develop solar-powered energy storage systems. GS Battery is a subsidiary of GS Yuasa Group of Japan, another country where solar-to-battery-to-grid studies are under way.

The collaboration between Suniva and GS Battery is to begin with a system using a 30-kilowatt array of Suniva’s solar modules and GSB’s battery technology at GS Battery’s headquarters in Roswell, Ga.

“Solar system owners that are able to store their energy output are also able to take advantage of many new economic opportunities,” said Yasuyuki Nakamura, President of GS Battery, in a news release. “Our state-of- the art approach allows customers to achieve better returns on investment with a more flexible and profitable solar energy supply. We are excited about the value of utilizing Suniva’s high-powered modules with our battery technology.”

V2G is economically viable because electric car owners are buying batteries anyway, so it makes sense to use them for communal energy storage. It would be more costly for electric grids to install other storage systems.

Existing vehicles cannot easily be fitted with V2G but in the next five years as many as 1m new electric cars are likely to be sold in the US.

With each car providing 10 kilowatts of power, 1m V2G cars would provide a balancing reserve amounting to several gigawatts - reducing the need for new power station construction.

Concentrating PV: More Efficient Than PV?

khalifa saber — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:08:09 +0000

The scientific and political stage for the success of solar energy is set. Markets are huge. Management of growth is the key. Once demonstration plants run according to plans and expectations, just two years should show that CPV does indeed deliver. The past twelve months may not have been the best time to be rolling out a newly commercialized branch of the PV sector, but advocates of concentrating PV are confident that its time has come.

If we imagine a future where twenty years on, with terawatts installed, Concentrating PV, or CPV for short, will be part of a trillion euro market. We are imagining a future where CPV offers one of the most promising utility-scale, and sustainable, renewable energy technology options. CPV has the potential of an efficiency reaching and exceeding 50%. And, in the right locations, will have electricity costs low enough to be competitive with fossil and nuclear power.

CPV is not new, having been in the labs – and demonstration plants – since the 1970s, when a very early modern photovoltaic concentrating system was developed in the US, at Sandia National Laboratories. However as recently as 2004 just 1 MW of new concentrating PV was installed.

During 2009, the installation of CPV has speeded up, with tens of megawatts having been constructed. Nancy Hartsoch of SolFocus estimates that the industry is likely to see between 200 and 250 MW of concentrating PV installed this year.

Hartsoch reckons that the size of market where CPV can be really competitive today is over a gigawatt – ‘but it depends how quickly the industry can ramp up’. Another possible slowing factor she sees is how quickly the industry will adopt new technologies. Her own company is building 15 MW this year, not all of which will be deployed in 2009. ‘We will go out of 2009 with a 50-MW capacity, compared with half a megawatt last year’, she told us. During 2010, that production capacity will be ramped further, to 75 MW.

Hansjoerg Lerchenmueller, CEO of Concentrix Solar, is in broad agreement. Last year his company, following two years of operating a pilot manufacturing plant, ramped up to a fully automated 25-MW manufacturing plant delivering 50 modules per hour.

Key to the uptake of CPV technology is getting the costs to a level that is palatable for developers. The key to that, most commentators are agreed, is in on the one hand through efficiency improvements (cells and optics) and on the other through reducing manufacturing cost – and that means increased volumes. What it also takes is the right market conditions within the climate zones where CPV functions – for, like concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) this technology is no friend of diffuse radiation, but comes into its own under the clear blue skies of high solar resource regions.

In terms of application, the future of CPV has always seemed most likely to be in ground-mounted, utility-scale plants – and that’s the very market that has emerged over the past three to four years.

Essential, according to Lerchenmueller, is bankability of these technologies. Project developers need finance, and banks are cautious, especially in these times. Availability of project finance to would-be PV project developers has been tough over the past 12 months, and particularly tough for companies bringing a new technology to market.

Happily, Concentrix has a just completed a procedure with a leading German project financing bank, which Lerchenmueller calls a ‘most important milestone’. The company has worked with a project financing bank, working through various due diligence procedures, and independent consultants who evaluated the technology have confirmed that they don’t regard it as having any higher risks than other PV technologies. ‘With this bankability milestone passed we have solved the problems of entering the commercial market’, commented Lerchenmueller. ‘One of the major prerequisites was having two power plants under operation for more than a year’, he explains (Concentrix has had one at ISFOC in Spain, and another in Seville where Abengoa is testing several technologies), adding, ‘that is what the banks were looking for’.

The Basic Principles of Concentrating PV

The principle of concentrating PV (CPV) is quite straightforward. In the familiar ‘flat-plate’ PV modules, a large area of photovoltaic material (usually crystalline silicon) is exposed to the maximum naturally occurring sunlight. Normally, that maximum is achieved by installing the modules at an incline optimized for the latitude, but sometimes they are installed on trackers (moving frames) that can follow, or track, the sun as it passes across the sky. The PV cells perform under direct (sunny) or diffuse (cloudy) radiation conditions, but output is at its highest when the maximum amount of light falls on the cells (assuming there are no detrimental effects from overheating). The amount of light that falls on a cloudless day (this varies according to location and season) is regarded as one ‘sun’, which is defined as 1000 W/m².

Concentrating PV systems use lenses or mirrors to focus sunlight onto a small amount of photovoltaic material. (Usually the Fresnel lens is used, a flat lens that uses a miniature sawtooth design to focus incoming light. When the teeth are arranged in concentric circles, light is focused at a central point. When the teeth run in straight rows, the lenses act as line-focusing concentrators.) The concentration ratio can vary: if the light that falls on 100 cm² is focused onto 1 cm² of PV material, the ratio is considered as 100 suns. If the light from 10 cm² is focused onto that 1 cm², the ratio is 10 suns.

If the concentrated sunlight light falls onto a well designed CPV cell, the cell will produce at least 100 times, or 10 times, the electricity. In fact the conversion efficiency of cells increases under concentrated light, so the correlation is likely to be greater than one-to-one, depending on the design of the solar cell and the material used to make it.

While commercial concentration ratios are around 200 to 300 suns, as much as 1000 suns is expected for future concentrating PV systems. As most CPV systems use only direct solar radiation, these installations almost always involve trackers (rotating about either one axis or two axes and therefore called one-axis or two-axis tracking) to keep the sun focused on the solar cell.

At low concentrations, and generally with single-axis trackers, CPV generally makes use of silicon cells. However, concentrating PV also offers the option of shifting away from crystalline silicon to use the very high-efficiency, non-silicon cells. Such cells have mostly been developed primarily for space applications. These multi-junction III–V cells (which use elements from columns three and five of the periodic table, typically gallium and arsenide) are prohibitively expensive for extensive use in large flat panel arrays. Concentrator systems, however, because they require far smaller and fewer cells, can afford the higher cost of multi-junction cells and yet still be manufactured at an acceptable dollar-per-watt cost .

Making The Cells Work Harder

One of the key things to grasp about CPV is just how hard the systems can make a multi-junction cell work – the output from a 1 cm² cell can be hundreds of times higher than when it is not in CPV mode. One company, Emcore, puts it simply on its website: ‘For example, under 500-sun concentration, 1 cm² of solar cell area produces the same electricity as 500 cm² would, without concentration’. The latest edition of Energy from the Desert, from the IEA’s very large-scale PV power group, cites field test results from Toyohashi University (latitude 34.7°N), where a 500x CPV module ‘showed energy generation as high as 277 kWh/m²/year from 2004 to 2005, while a parallel fixed flat plate PV system at this site produced only 147 kWh/m²/year. This was due in part to the high efficiency PV used’.

These high efficiency cells – upwards of 38% in the case of non-silicon cells – yield panels performing at 25% and beyond (note that some companies cite DC panel efficiencies, others AC, i.e. after the inverter and thus slightly lower). This summer, Concentrix Solar of Germany revealed efficiency figures for its demonstration system at its commercial CPV power plant in Spain, reporting that on clear days at the 2-MW Casaquemada power plant in Seville, system efficiencies of 25% AC (i.e. measured after the inverter) were consistently measured for the entire concentrator power plant under normal field operating conditions. And for its new FLATCON CX-75 the company claims an average module efficiency of 27.2% DC. Says Lerchenmueller: ‘27.2% was an average – the champions are even above that. The highest so far was 29%’.

Amonix of the United States introduced this March its Amonix 7700 product, the latest in a line of products going back to 1989. Interestingly, that company has now switched from using silicon to Spectrolab’s gallium arsenide-based multi-junction cells, which have 37%–38% efficiency. The company now claims an efficiency of 25% AC (again, measured after the inverter.)

As manufacturers of III-V cells move towards higher volumes it will also benefit CPV manufacturers, says Lerchenmueller. There is a lot of activity from the existing cell manufacturers, plus other companies are moving in to the terrestrial CPV cells sector, particularly the companies involved in the manufacture of solar cells for space applications (mostly satellites), which today exclusively use triple-junction solar cells because of their superior performance.

Scaled-up Manufacturing

A decade ago, says Sarah Kurtz of the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), it would have been difficult for companies to have confidence that they could find markets for the volume they needed to justify economy-of-scale manufacturing. But the growth of the PV market, and especially the tracker segment, she says, is an important contributor to the increased interest in CPV, noting: ‘After reliable prototypes have been demonstrated, companies must automate the manufacturing of these and then retest the reliability to ensure that subtle changes in the design do not negatively impact reliability. Some of the companies have planned for high-volume manufacturing from the start, but all companies must include this step in their development plan at some stage.’

While the outward signs are good, several manufacturers are still awaiting the right moment, or finance, to step up to the next level of play. Nancy Hartsoch says her company believes firmly in a ‘get-on-with-it’ approach: ‘Once you have the manufacturing figured out you can continue to drive efficiency up from your base product,’ SolFocus decided to bite the bullet and build a fully automated manufacturing capability, and then expand it, as a strategy to bring down the manufacturing cost by means of economies of scale.

This requires a certain pragmatism. In an interview she told us: ‘For the past 12 months we’ve been focused on how we make this thing in volume. You lock the design, you quit designing, and focus on performance and manufacturability. What some companies do is have trouble saying‚ “we’re done designing, we’re going to build it now.” But every time you change how you build it, you’ve impacted that ability to go to high volume and low cost. So with our next generation product that we are starting on now, one parameter is that we have to use the same manufacturing machinery. So you don’t have to redesign your entire manufacturing line to do it! We have a manufacturing model that says it’s 15 cents per watt capex to build a factory. Which means that for US$15 million you can put in a 50 MW factory.’

Lerchenmueller says Concentrix has a similar approach, and has frozen its technology on the manufacturing side, while deploying product to several installations. Meanwhile, he points out, it’s important to keep working on product development so that next generation releases can be made – as they are, say, in the computer industry.

Hartsoch says that while CPV is a real opportunity ‘the challenge for any company is can you manufacture it, and deploy it? Is the technology risk too great for the cost savings? When you didn’t have a cost advantage you had to find early adopters who wanted to get engaged because they thought the technology had a promising future. But now we’ve made that turn, it can stand on its own merit in terms of cost, so you’re really only dealing with that technology challenge versus end cost.’

Tracking Is The Thing

CPV needs to be reliable if investors and utilities are to buy into it. Accurate and reliable tracking of the sun is needed in highly concentrating devices to maintain the focus of the solar energy on the cell and yield the best results – good systems can track accurately to within a tenth of a degree. Secondary optical lenses can help minimize requirements for tracking accuracy at higher concentration ratios.

Some critics have said that the need for moving parts and highly accurate tracking is a reason why CPV can never be reliable. However, this myth is disputed by Kurtz, who has commented in the past that there have been very few tracker problems on the existing CPV installations – and that in fact inverters have proved more problematic than trackers. Certainly the trackers have to be highly accurate and need to avoid flexing in strong winds.

However, in recent years increasing numbers of large, non-concentrating PV installations have opted to use trackers to optimize output – driven in part by feed-in tariffs. Thus the principle and practice of using trackers has become a much more standard option than in the past. 2008 data from www.pvresources.com (cited in Energy from the Desert) indicate that two-thirds of large PV plants (average capacity 18 MW) now use tracking technology.

Cool Down

Under the kinds of solar regimes favoured by CPV, photovoltaics tend to lose some performance efficiency due to the heat. Surely, the added factor of focusing the sun’s rays several hundred times simply exaggerates this? High concentration ratios can potentially introduce a heat problem. Because cell efficiencies decrease as temperatures increase, and higher temperatures also threaten the long-term stability of solar cells, the cells must be kept as cool as possible.

However, this has not been problematic in concentrator systems – maintenance of temperatures is generally achieved by using a highly conductive material such as copper directly behind the cells to spread the heat, and some systems use air cooling. According to a rule of thumb, a heat spreader area is needed equal to the aperture area. In practice, concentrator cells operate in the same temperature range as flat plate PV cells. In the case of dish concentrators (such as the Australian Solar Systems design) the cells can actually be cooled to lower temperatures.

In an online discussion, SolFocus’ Gary Conley explained of their product ‘The concentration factor is 500 suns. The cells operate ~40°C (104°F) over ambient through passive cooling techniques, obviating the need for complex liquid cooling. All solar is good but each has its sweet spot. CPV is best in high DNI (sunny) locations, which are usually hot. Silicon panels can lose up to 30% of their rated efficiencies in such conditions while the triple-junction cells employed in HCPV designs lose just 3% at 100°C (212°F).

Silicon-Based CPV

While, as mentioned above, Amonix has recently switched from using silicon to a III-V cell, others remain committed to silicon-based CPV – for the present, at least. These are mainly – though not exclusively – companies taking a low-concentration approach. For example, Whitfield Solar’s CPV device has now launched as a commercial product after years of development. ‘We had a huge interest shown in the product’, says CTO Clive Weatherby.

This company, a spin-off from the University of Reading and based on almost four decades of CPV research and development, led for years by the late George Whitfield, says its aim in developing the product has been to create a simple, reliable, strong and lightweight product that uses some solutions that have been transferred across from other industries (notably the automotive industry), and which have proven themselves through years of operation. The system is light enough for rooftop mounting, but can also be ground-mounted without, explains Weatherby, the need for permanent concrete foundations to be poured on-site.

Each 3.6 x 1.3 metre ‘panel’ consists of a frame which supports ‘power troughs’ – each a sealed unit. Each trough contains 12 small, series-connected monocrystalline silicon cells with diode protection.

Each is covered with a single moulded lens (70x solar concentration) that concentrates the sun onto each cell – the sealed unit is based on car headlight manufacturing technology. An innovative cooling system enables the cells to run cooler than those in conventional PV panels.

Whitfield’s system has an integrated dual-axis tracker that uses small electric motors. ‘These have proven long-term durability and reliability thanks to their more common use in car window-winder systems’, says the company. The trackers also apparently have in-built intelligence: ‘This highly optimized system requires no pre-programming or site-specific data – just position and go!’

Whitfield’s approach was also to design a product that can be manufactured in existing factories and, in May this year, the company signed a manufacturing agreement with Cobo SpA of Italy. The Italian base will serve as a launch site for the initial target markets, but Cobo also has the infrastructure to offer access to other international markets.

Having optimized its production engineering, Whitfield, like the other companies, plans to use this as a platform for further refinements to the product – the power troughs are compatible with a range of alternative cell technologies as they become commercially viable.

What is the Market?

As utility-scale solar ramps up in Mediterranean Europe, the US Southwest, in India (that recently announced it a huge national plan), and as markets emerge in the Middle East and North African countries, plus China, South Africa and Australia, it’s interesting that two powerful solar technologies that have spent decades achieving or maintaining maturity now find themselves competitors in the sunbelts – CPV and concentrating solar thermal power, or CSP. Each has its pros and cons.

According to Kurtz, ‘When compared with solar thermal approaches, CPV provides a qualitatively different approach, typically with lower water usage, greater flexibility in size of installation, and the ability to respond more quickly when the sun returns on a cloudy day.’

Lerchenmueller also stresses the issue of water in most of the target environments for CPV/CSP. ‘CSP can use dry cooling but this increases cost significantly. Finally the growth rates you can achieve in PV – especially CPV are so much higher because the deployment of the technology is much more flexible.’ He also speaks about the advantages of CPV’s modularity compared with CSP: ‘If a plot of land doesn’t allow 50 MW we can do 10 MW. Or 1 MW for a customer to try. That’s a huge advantage.’

According to Hartsoch, 2009 has been very flat, as was predicted. But, looking ahead to 2010, the overall PV market has seen predictions of 30%–40% growth again. She says: ‘If you look at the high solar resource regions versus the low resource regions, the high resource regions are growing at 48%, compared with 24% in the lower. So for CPV as an industry, where that technology fits the best is where that market is growing.’

Clearly, developers and their financiers look very carefully at the balance of investment costs versus income. Even with (non-concentrating) PV modules priced as they were 1–2 years ago, some viewed the addition of trackers to their large-scale, flat-plate installations as an expense that it wasn’t worth making. As module prices fall, perhaps one might expect there to be a lower uptake of tracking technology. But how are the current market prices likely to affect the CPV technology sector going forward?

Says Lerchenmueller of Concentrix: ‘Of course the price drop in crystalline silicon and to some extent thin-film makes our market introduction more difficult, as we are not yet at full volume. On the other hand, in the mid-to-long term the perspectives are just great. We have a 25 MW manufacturing line. Once this is filled to 60%–70% capacity we can match the price of thin-film. Imagine once we are manufacturing at a larger scale. And we can certainly beat the price for CSP. I’m more than convinced, the prospects are great.’

Live Debate “Is it too late to stop climate change?”

khalifa saber — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:24:28 +0000

The Times Online is running a live online debate called “Is it too late to stop climate change?” on November 25 at 2pm - http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/related_reports/the_future_of_energy/article6925491.ece

Chairing the debate on will be the author of The Times’ The Future of Energy focus reports, Alan Copps. Following 20 years of reporting for regional and national papers, Copps was appointed The Times’ news editor in 1989, a post he held until 1994. He moved to the features department where he edited supplements on both motoring and technology. Since 2007, he has been freelancing, writing mainly on motoring and environmental topics.

Joining Copps will be freelance environmental, travel and property journalist Flemmich Webb, whose film The Road to Copenhagen: Seal the Deal, was broadcast on CNBC Asia and Europe last month.
Dr Jeremy Woods, a lecturer in bioenergy at Imperial College, London, will also be taking part. Woods is a specialist in global environmental change and energy policy. He has a particular interest in development, land-use and the exploitation of biomass energy. He also coordinates a large EU-funded network on the study of bioethanol for sustainable transport (BEST).

Representing Royal Dutch Shell will be David Hone, the senior climate change adviser in the Shell CO2 team. Hone joined Shell in 1980 after graduating as a chemical engineer from the University of Adelaide in South Australia. He has worked closely with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and is lead author of its recent publications on climate change.

Climate Change May Be Irreversible For 1,000 Years After CO2 Emissions Are Stopped (0)

‘Broken’ Nanotubes are Better at Storing Electricity

khalifa saber — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:12:40 +0000

University of San Diego researchers have discovered that carbon nanotubes don’t have to be perfect to do a better job. Prabhakar Bandaru, a professor in the UCSD Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering have discovered that artificially introducing defects in carbon nanotubes would increase their energy storage capacity.

In most of the cases, the recently-discovered carbon nanotubes have been used for their excellent electricity-conducting properties, considered as one of the “wonder materials” of this century. CNTs have a cylindrical structure, with a diameter of 1 to 100 nm, and are atomically perfect – in theory.

Practically, though, carbon nanotubes are far from being perfect, and that has caught the attention of Jeff Nichols, an engineering graduate student. The effect rests in the creation of just the right amount of defects - enough to create additional charge sites on the nanotube, but not enough to break down its electrical conductivity.

The phenomena was then studied by Mark Hoefer: “We first realized that defective CNTs could be used for energy storage when we were investigating their use as electrodes for chemical sensors,” Hoefer said. “During our initial tests we noticed that we were able to create charged defects that could be used to increase CNT charge storage capabilities.”

Of course, all of this has a limit, because raising the defect rate for the nanotube above a certain threshold would alter its electrical conductivity properties, and make it worse. The scientists have also tried certain methods that could decrease the charge associated with the defects by bombarding the CNTs with argon or hydrogen.

We would all like our cellphones or laptops, or maybe electric cars in the future, to hold their charge for a long time, and to charge fast. Supercapacitors made with defective structured nanotubes could accomplish this dream.

Hoefer is very enthusiastic about the discovery: “It is remarkable how current tools and devices are becoming increasing more efficient and yet smaller due to discoveries made at the nanoscale,” he said. “My time spent investigating CNTs and their potential uses at the Jacobs School will prepare me for my career, since future research will continue the trend of miniaturization while increasing efficiency.”

image above is of carbon nanotubes taken using a field emission gun scanning electron microscope

Chinese Invest $1.5 Billion in West Texas Wind Farm

khalifa saber — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:35:47 +0000

Despite the tightness of global credit markets the Chinese are showing a willingness to finance renewable energy projects wherever they may be. A consortium of Chinese businesses backed by Chinese banks have committed $1.5 billion as part of joint venture to build 36,000-acre, 600-megawatt wind farm in West Texas, using turbines made in China.

The announcement on Thursday named Shenyang Power Group of China, Cielo Wind Power LP and U.S. Renewable Energy Group, a private equity firm based in Austin, Texas as the the three entities involved in the joint venture.

The project shows how much China’s own wind industry has grown and comes two days after U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu told lawmakers that the U.S. was falling behind China and others in alternative energy investment.

“With a long track record for building some of the world’s biggest wind farms, the U.S. is a real ideal target for foreign alternative energy investment,” said Jinxiang Lu, Shenyang Power Group’s chairman and chief executive.

The project will use 240 of its 2.5-megawatt turbines. Construction is scheduled to begin in March 2010, and the project is expected to create 300 temporary jobs and about 30 permanent jobs. Six hundred megawatts of wind power is enough to meet the electricity needs of between 135,000 and 180,000 American homes for a year.

Chinese wind turbine manufacturer A-Power Energy Generation Systems Ltd. will begin shipping the 2.5-megawatt turbines in March 2010, built in the company’s plant in the city of Shenyang.

he project’s owners, a joint venture that includes Dallas investor Cappy McGarr, say they’ll get financing from Chinese banks but are relying on a stimulus grant worth as much as $450 million.

“That is a key part of the economics to make the project work,” said Walt Hornaday, president of Austin-based Cielo Wind Power LP, one of three partners in the venture. “Without that, we would not be talking about this project.”

Team Tokai wins Global Green Challenge in Australia

khalifa saber — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:31:57 +0000

The Japanese Tokai University team built the solar powered car that won the Global Green Challenge on Wednesday after averaging speeds of more than 100 kilometres (62 miles) per hour in a four-day race through Australia’s desert Outback.

There was also the record breaking Tesla Roadster which broke the EV World Record by going for 313 Miles (501 KM) on Single Charge!

The Global Green Challenge in Australia is a showcase for alt-fuel vehicles of all kinds. It’s a good way to see what is currently possible, and of what direction the industry is going in terms of green transportation.

The Tokai Challenger crossed the finish line in Adelaide, South Australia, at 3:39 pm local time, after 29 hours and 49 minutes’ racing following Sunday’s departure from the northern city of Darwin.

The team, from Tokai University, averaged 100.54 kilometres per hour to snap a four-race winning streak by the Netherlands’ Nuon outfit. It is the first Japanese victory since Honda Dream II in 1993.

The futuristic Tokai put in a near-flawless run with only one flat tyre on the 3,000 kilometre race. Its nearest rivals were more than two hours behind and were due to battle it out for second place on Thursday.

Tesla Break Electric Vehicle Distance World Record

The latest record comes from a red 2008 Tesla Roadster: Simon Hackett and co-driver Emilis Prelgauskas drove 313 miles (501 km) on a single charge, something that no production EV has done before.

Simon Hackett said: “Emilis and I have decades of experience flying gliders competitively and we applied the same energy conservation techniques to our driving, with significant results! The car had about 3 miles of range left when the drive was completed. We travelled 501km on a single charge. Let that sink in for a minute.”

To squeeze out the most out of the Roadster’s battery, average speed was kept around 35 mph/55 kph. Above that speed, air resistance starts to require more energy to keep the car moving, reducing total range.

The Tesla’s 53 kWh lithium-ion battery was rated at 244 miles with the EPA’s methodology.

The Smart Grid Takes Shape in Germany with E-Energy Plan

khalifa saber — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:19:42 +0000

The new age of green electricity is beginning to take shape in Germany under the name E-Energy. The plan is a vision to create a giant renewable energy grid using inputs as diverse as huge offshore wind farms, gigantic solar farms in the deserts and mini-powers plants located on the roofs and in the basements of homes and offices. Smart appliances like washers and dryers will communicate with each other in order to wash or dry when electricity is cheapest.

This new smart electricity generation and grid test will begin in six German regions, involving several cities and tens of thousands of homes and hundreds of businesses will begin in earnest this month. Research will be conducted into the possibility, for example, of homes that can largely produce all the electricity required by a household, as well as energy exchanges that enable consumers to sell any excess, self-produced and environmentally friendly electricity at a profit back to the energy grid.

Participating firms include Siemens, SAP, IBM and energy giants like EnBW, RWE and Vattenfall, Germany’s economics and environment ministries have already mobilized €140 million for the development of the associated technologies and the tests. The government has provided €60 million and the industrial partners are raising the rest together with public utilities and smaller, innovative technology partners.

This is all part of an accelerating trend with number of recent developments suggesting the energy revolution is at hand:

Companies like Munich Re, Siemens, Deutsche Bank, E.on and RWE, are working together under the name Desertec, want to build giant solar power plants in Africa’s Sahara desert to feed the European grid.
Car parts maker Bosch acquired solar cell manufacturer Ersol in 2008 and, rumors suggest, is currently working to designs for solar powered car components.
Carmaker Volkswagen, together with ecologically friendly energy utility Lichtblick, wants to install 100,000 mini power plants directly in consumers’ homes.
In mid-September, the German federal government agreed to the massive expansion of power generation through large offshore windparks.
Google (GOOG) is also trying to get in on the smart grid action. The US company is developing software to allow consumers to track their electricity usage in real-time over the Internet.
Cisco is working with one large European electricity grid provider to create a smart power grid of the future. By mid-2010, the company wants to equip power lines, substations and transformers with information technology.

Energy and IT markets are drawing closer together and the automobile industry will likely follow soon. A new business sector born from the amalgamation of these three immense sectors could create new opportunities for partnerships and change the economic landscape. It will open up new business opportunities for the automobile sector, power and IT companies as well as innovative start-ups, providing vast growth opportunities.

Residents of the cities of Karlsruhe and Stuttgart, where a government pilot E-Energy project is being tested, are already experiencing what it is like to be part a smart grid. There, 200 homes and companies have been equipped with photovoltaic systems and CHPs or fuel cells.

This model transforms the consumer into a producer who can make some money in the energy market. They are also testing a pricing model in which electricity rates depend on supply and demand. If the amount of available energy goes down, the rates go up correspondingly. Users can monitor the system on an Internet portal and generate energy whenever the price peaks, thereby also stabilizing the overall supply.

The true environmental revolution will happen from the bottom up, through mini power stations in basements of private homes, that generate both heat and power, as well as solar panels that can cover the electricity needs of factories. In future, energy will be supplied from millions of networked mini power plants rather than from relatively few centralized sources.

Volkswagen and utility company Lichtblick launched their first major offensive on the people power grid in September. The two companies intend to install up to 100,000 combined heat and power units (CHPs) in the basements of apartment buildings. They will initially be fired by natural gas, later on possibly by biogas. The basement power plants will heat the homes while simultaneously producing electricity and sending precise data to the companies. The companies believe the total investment in the project will come to €2 billion.

Right now it is nearly impossible for consumers to see much electricity they are using on a daily basis, but there are devices now being made that will give homes and businesses a more accurate idea of the energy they are consuming. The smart grid would tell consumers how much electricity each appliance is using. And consumers will be able to do a lot more to determine at which prices they consume electricity. Customers will be able to cut their electricity bills, moreover, by pinpointing off-peak hours to run their energy-intensive machines

A household’s smart devices would be controlled by so-called home management systems. In the city of Mannheim, also home to an E-Energy pilot project, companies like Papendorf Software Engineering are developing related hardware and software under the “Energy Butler” label.

In addition to smart meters, a number of other potential growth markets are being tested as part of the E-Energy project. German household appliance maker Miele, for example, is supplying hundreds of homes in the Ruhr region with intelligent washing machines that provide exact details about usage and can be either programmed or operated remotely to automatically turn on and do their work at times of the day when electricity is cheapest. Other companies are building adapters that can turn older machines on and off, based on energy prices.

This sort of energy management—that can switch appliances on and off depending on the amount of energy available from wind farms and solar plants—is the main prerequisite for a power grid running largely on renewable energies. Supply and demand have to be tightly controlled to keep the grid from crashing.

Innovative energy storage systems are also intended for the system. Batteries up until now have proven too expensive and in some cases too inefficient for the task. Now scientists are looking into other ways of storing energy, and new concepts are being tested in the German port city of Cuxhafen.

During peak times, the region is able to produce more than 80 percent of its needed electricity using wind turbines, but when the wind dies down, so does the capacity to supply electricity. “To make up for fluctuations,” said project leader Wolfram Krause, “cold stores could be cooled more than needed or swimming pools overheated. If less electricity is available later, cooling and heating devices could be temporarily turned off until the energy buffer has been used up.”

Storage solutions could also play a special role in electric cars in the future. In one E-Energy project in Germany’s Harz mountains region, they serve as reserve batteries from the regional power net. If electricity supplies are low, cars not in use can also feed energy back into the grid.

If millions of small power stations are feeding the mains with a fluctuating quantity of electricity, and millions upon millions of terminal devices and home management systems are transmitting energy consumption data or receiving commands, the grid operators’ systems could go haywire. The power transmission has to be continually adjusted at millisecond intervals. And it’s a process that can only be achieved if it is highly automated.

That’s why setting up such an intelligent power grid, that can manage this mass of data across the country, is probably the biggest challenge of the new electric age. “The deployment of all modern energy technologies will rise or fall based on the construction of a communications network that can deal with mass amounts of real-time data and transport them using Internet Protocols,” said Ingo Schönberg, the head of Power Plus Communications (PPC), a company that is producing such technologies. “A smart grid is the backbone of the new infrastructure.”

It’s also one of the most lucrative emerging business opportunities. The hitherto dominant energy giants are suddenly faced with new and formidable foes: technology groups keen on seizing control over energy supplies on the Internet. Siemens CEO Peter Löscher puts the volume of the smart grid market at €30 billion by the year 2014. In September, the company said it was planning to invest €6 billion in this area over that period.

“We are calculating a future annual market potential of $20 billion,” said Cisco SmartGrid executive Christian Feisst. He believes that within 10 years the technology will be deployable on a mass scale. And PPC’s Schönberg believes that smart grids will be available in some cities in the next few years and that they will be available to the masses by the middle of the next decade. He said the first aim must be to automate as many measuring and control processes as possible in order to reduce the increasing levels of complexity. Cisco is currently conducting pilot tests of smart grids, but the company said it would like to provide an entire region with intelligent electricity by mid-2010.

Companies including Siemens, ABB and IBM are developing central system platforms that can collect all the data on decentralized energy production and consumption. The systems also calculate electricity prices based on fluctuations and pass this information back to consumers using broadband connections or by mobile radio. Together, these technologies will create an energy market place in which consumers themselves can buy and sell power.

A market in which energy is traded according to supply and demand will provide immense opportunities for service providers and startups. Some are developing systems to predict rate fluctuations based on weather forecasts and behavioral statistics. Start-ups can also come up with business innovations for a new version of the energy grid. The foundation of this new smart grid is cheap, ubiquitous microchips embedded in devices that use energy, store energy and devices that consume energy and a vast network of interconnected computers, otherwise known as the internet to manage them all.

Image by Schwarzerkater

GE Completes Purchase of Gearless Wind Turbine Manufacturer ScanWind

khalifa saber — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:20:13 +0000

With the acquisition of ScanWind, based in Trondheim, Norway, GE has secured a foothold in the growing offshore wind energy market. GE is gambling that ScanWinds early-stage turbine technology that could make offshore wind farms cheaper to maintain.

Instead of gearboxes, ScanWind uses a novel direct-drive generator technology in its 3.5-megawatt turbines. ScanWind’s turbine design gets rid of the gearbox completely. Instead, the rotor shaft is attached directly to the generator, which spins at the same speed as the blades. This makes the turbines more reliable, the company says, by cutting downtime and repair costs, an especially important consideration for turbines offshore, where it’s more expensive to send technicians for maintenance. ScanWind has been testing the turbines on the Norwegian coast since 2003.

The multiple wheels and bearings in a wind turbine gearbox suffer tremendous stress because of wind turbulence, and a small defect in any one component can bring the turbine to a halt. This makes the gearbox the most high-maintenance part of a turbine. Gearboxes in offshore turbines, which face higher wind speeds, are even more vulnerable than those in onshore turbines.

GE, based in Fairfield, CT, is the world’s second-largest maker of wind turbines, with more than 12,000 turbines installed globally. But GE’s offshore wind energy portfolio has been minimal so far, and the company wants to expand its offshore offerings. By acquiring ScanWind, transferring its expertise and understanding of onshore wind, and adding technologies such as remote monitoring and sensing, GE hopes it can make a solid, cost-effective offshore wind product.

In conventional wind turbines, the blades spin a shaft that is connected through a gearbox to the generator. The gearbox converts the turning speed of the blades (15 to 20 rpm for a large 1MW turbine) into the faster 1,800 rotations per minute that the generator needs to generate electricity. “Wind turbines are very different than any other gearbox application,” says Sandy Butterfield, chief engineer of the wind program at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO. “You’re going from a very low speed to a high speed.” Typically it’s the opposite.

In a turbine generator, magnets spin around a coil to produce current, the faster the magnets spin, the more current is induced in the coil. To make up for a direct drive generator’s slower spinning rate, the radius of rotation is increased, effectively increasing the speed with which the magnets move around the coil.

“Eliminating the gearbox from the wind turbine [removes] the technically most complicated part of the machine, inherently improving reliability,” says Henrik Stiesdal, chief technology officer of Siemens AG. Furthermore, if a permanent magnet is used in the generator, as is the case with newer turbines, the efficiency goes up even more. That’s because, unlike today’s electromagnetic generators, permanent magnets don’t need power.

Direct-drive generators currently cost more than geared systems and are 15 to 20 percent heavier. Still, GE’s decision to buy ScanWind is smart, says Butterfield. “Offshore machines are so expensive in terms of maintenance that some people are thinking the tradeoff tilts in favor of direct-drive generators,” he says. “I am optimistic that there is technology out there that’s going to help bring direct-drive generators down in parity with the weight and cost of geared systems.”

The leader in offshore wind energy, Siemens, has been testing two 3.6-megawatt proof-of-concept direct-drive turbines near Denmark for over a year now. Stiesdal says that the technology has proven to work just as well as gearboxes in terms of power, vibrations, temperature, noise, and reliability. Now it’s a matter of bringing down its cost.

GE expects to have a market-ready product by late 2012. It is targeting the European market initially because nearly all of the 1,473 megawatts of offshore wind power currently available come from installations along European coasts. According to industry analysts, this capacity must reach 30,000 megawatts by 2020 if the European Union is to meet its renewable-energy targets. One of the reasons for choosing ScanWind, says GE, is because of the company’s footprint in the Nordic countries, which, along with the U.K. and Germany, are the brightest spots for offshore wind energy.

image credit ScanWind / GE

Worlds Largest Electric Car Charging Network Begins

khalifa saber — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 21:48:39 +0000

This week saw the largest transportation electrification project in history begin. On 10/1/2009, eTec announced that they have officially signed the $99.8 million grant with DOE to start installing Electric Vehicle Infrastructure in 5 States, Arizona, California, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington. So I thought this might be a good time to examine the aims of the grant, the company involved and other companies involved in this space.

This is truly a milestone in the US’ and the Worlds in the adoption of Electric Vehicles. Due to the grant’s objectives, the transparency guidelines for taking the money, and observing consumer behaviors, this is seen more as a huge research project than a commercial enterprise. The potential lessons are hugely important in ensuring the smoothest, most cost effective transition to an electric vehicle fleet. Some of the questions this wide ranging, real world ’study’ can answer are:

Where are the best places to install charging stations…especially fast chargers?
How does having a charger near a retail location or restaurant affect consumer behavior?
How will range anxiety affect EV owners?
Monetizing electric vehicle charging - what works and what doesn’t?
How the ev’s charging network might work together with the smart grid concept?
What will be the actual dynamic between municipalities, utilities, business, and consumers on their adoption in the various cities?

ECOtality Inc.

signed a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy for a grant of $99.8 million to deploy what the company said is the largest charging infrastructure for electric vehicles in history.

The Electric Transportation Engineering Corp., or eTec is a subsidiary of Scottsdale-based ECOtality Inc. will deploy more than 11,000 chargers and 4,700 Nissan Leaf zero-emission electric vehicles.

The company has launched an official Web site for the project, www.theEVproject.com, to sign up to receive free charge infrastructure at a home or business. It also provides maps to show where charge stations are located.

“We can now work to make widespread electric vehicle use a reality by studying lessons learned from this project and providing a blueprint for other cities to adopt electric vehicles,” said ECOtality President Jonathan Read.

The project is in partnership with Nissan North America, which will deploy 4,700 of its all-electric Leaf vehicles which are scheduled for release in fall 2010.

As part of the project, Oregon expects to receive just under 1,000 of the Nissan vehicles and around 2,000 charging stations, centered around Portland, Eugene, Salem and Corvallis.

ETec won’t begin deploying the charging infrastructure until summer 2010.

Once deployed, the project will collect and analyze data to evaluate the effectiveness of electric vehicles in various topographic and climate conditions. The project also includes conducting trials on various means of collecting revenue for commercial and public charging infrastructure.

According to their website “eTec’s proprietary Minit-Charger technology can provide a safe and meaningful charge for an EV in approximately 15 minutes.”

ECOtality, whose subsidiary eTec snagged a nearly $100 million federal stimulus grant last month to support what the company describes as “the largest deployment of EV chargers and vehicles ever” (12,750 charging systems in five states for 5,000 Nissan LEAF electric vehicles), has formed two joint ventures with China’s Shenzhen Goch Investment, or SGI, in order to manufacture, assemble and sell EV charging equipment in China.

SGI will contribute $10 million for the manufacturing and assembly venture, which SGI founder Dongsheng Gong envisions will supply charging systems for “industrial, airport and on-road electric vehicle applications around the world,” and another $5 million for the sales effort.

The market for electric car charging systems in China is being driven by several forces. Chinese automakers, including BYD, Chery and Geely, have a strategic reason to go electric: Legacy car companies in North America, Europe and Japan haven’t yet mastered the technology, and so moving early and fast could allow China-based companies to grab a lead in the nascent market.

In addition, as China’s vice minister for industry and information technology, Miao Wei, a former Dongfeng Motor chairman, told the New York Times earlier this year, “the Chinese auto industry cannot grow sustainably” unless the “bottlenecks” of air pollution, rising consumption of imported oil and traffic congestion are addressed. Hoping to alleviate at least some of these problems, the Chinese government has thrown its weight behind electric vehicles, providing subsidies for research and electric vehicle purchases. All of that spells big opportunity for a company like ECOtality.

SolarCity and Tesla To Build 4 Charging Stations in California

A joint venture between Foster City-based SolarCity and San Carlos-based Tesla Motors, the solar charging stations will be placed at four specific Rabobank locations (Salinas, Atascadero, Santa Maria and Goleta) along the 101 route from San Francisco to Los Angeles, one of the most heavily traveled roadways in the world.

Rabobank, another participant in the revolutionary endeavor, is an international financial services provider located in 16 countries with headquarters in the Netherlands. Together, the three entities now offer solar charging venues to Tesla drivers.

Next year, according to SolarCity spokesman Jonathan Bass, the company will refit the charging stations to correspond to standards established by the Society of Automotive Engineers, making them available to drivers of other electric vehicles as well.

The solar charging stations are part of a marketing strategy, of course, but they also represent the companies’ focus on reducing the use of fossil fuels and the attendant emissions that contribute to global warming.

To Lyndon Rive, SolarCity’s CEO, they represent the “escape hatch” by which today’s consumers can escape the carbon economy. This is, in spite of its consumer-culture orientation, a worthy target. Rive is also adding some other incentives to the campaign, namely the purchase of a solar photovoltaic (PV) system with its own, free, EV (electronic vehicle) system.

SolarCity, founded in 2006, is one of the few solar installers to offer financing options to both commercial and residential solar energy customers. The Sept. 18 purchase of SolSource Energy (a solar installer offering electric car charging stations) allowed SolarCity to move confidently into this new venue.

Funding for the project came from the California Air Resources Board, which in 2007 provided a grant to Tesla of $641,000, according to Tesla spokeswoman Rachel Konrad. Part of that grant went into the cooperative development, with Auburn-based EV supplier Clipper Creek, of a fast-charging unit that Tesla has named the “High Power Connector”. This unit delivers up to 70 amps (240 volts) of electricity, which can charge the Tesla Roadster in as few as 3.5 hours.

The balance, about $80,000, went into establishing the charging spots and buying equipment for the installations. SolarCity also installed a 30-kilowatt solar energy array at the Rabobank’s bank’s Santa Maria branch, and a power purchase agreement will allow the bank to pay for the electricity generated while SolarCity maintains ownership of the array and the charging stations. Rabobank will cover the costs of recharging, which aren’t expected to be significant given the small number of Tesla electric vehicles currently on California roads, but that will likely change in the near future as auto makers ramp up EV production.

The High Power Connector comes with a price tag of $3,000, but can be installed in any garage or carport with a 15-amp circuit. Tesla cars can also be charged with any 110-volt outlet, but this process can take up to 1.5 days.

Panasonic to Sell Electric Car Chargers for Home and Business

Japan’s Panasonic Electric Works Co. said Thursday it will release a battery charger for all-electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids in June 2010. Elseev commercial charger will sell for equivalent of US$2,100.

The recharging device, dubbed Elseev, will sell for around 200,000 yen for use at public facilities and corporate parking lots.

In fiscal 2011 ending in March 2012, the company aims to sell 10,000 units of the device, which is 21 centimeters long, 28 centimeters wide and 160 centimeters high.

The company plans to release a home battery charger if electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids become more popular.

Electric Car Charger from ZAP Cuts Recharge Time from Hours to Minute

Electric car pioneer ZAP is saying about a new charging technology for their XEBRA electric car or truck.

ZAP says the charger on the XEBRA can be configured for charging with either a 110 or 220-volt outlet like the ones used with a household washer and dryer. The new charger is able to provide up to 100 amps or 10,000 watts of electricity into the vehicle and ZAP Chairman Gary Starr says it will significantly extend daily driving range.

“This new charger can reduce your charge time from hours to minutes,” said Starr. “Now you can drive your electric car all day with just a few short stops. In the time it takes to eat lunch you can hook your XEBRA up to the charger and have a full charge in less than an hour. Think of it as putting your XEBRA out to graze.”

Normally the XEBRA recharges in under six hours, but Starr says the new charger would be ideal for fleets, government agencies, corporations, universities and multi-car families looking to incorporate all-electric vehicles. It connects to a 240-volt, 60 amp circuit or 208-volt, 3-phase, 50 amp circuit. The fast charger is similar to ones used at Southwest Airlines, America West Airlines, the Toronto Pearson International Airport, and Arizona Public Service for recharging their fleets.

The new charger can be ordered through ZAP for about $9,000 and can even qualify for a Federal 30 percent tax credit. See IRS Tax Form 8911 for the Alternative Fuel Vehicle Property Credit. Starr added that people needing an even faster recharge could order a charger capable of putting out 15 kW or 50 percent more power.

ZAP calls the XEBRA design a ‘city-car,’ available as a 4-door sedan or 2-passenger truck, good for city-speed driving up to 40 MPH and priced about $10,000. ZAP recently introduced another way of improving range and battery life with an optional rooftop solar panel.

Smart USA Chooses Coulomb Technologies to Supply EV Chargers

The Smart fortwo ED is an upcoming pure electric car. It will be built by Daimler and use lithium-ion battery packs supplied by Tesla Motors. Testing of prototypes has been underway in Europe since 2007.

Earlier this year Daimler announced it would be bringing the vehicle into global production including the United States. Vehicle deliveries are intended to begin in 2010.

Coulomb Technology is the California-based start-up that has been deploying smart networked public electric car chargers. The company has been officially been selected by Daimler to exclusively supply the chargers for home use that will come with the electric smarts.

Coulomb offers unique wireless communication technology embedded in the chargers. This allows users to check charger availability and status via an online interface. The technology also allows for a subscription service so users can charge their EV at any Coulomb charger. These have already started being deployed in the public sphere across the nation.

The Smart program is Coulomb’s first step into the home charger market.

“Smart USA is demonstrating their commitment to reducing emissions and dependency on foreign oil with the introduction of their electric drive smart fortwo,” said Richard Lowenthal, CEO of Coulomb Technologies. “We are proud to say that our partnership with smart USA will provide their electric car buyers with home and public charging capabilities including energy cost optimization, web and smartphone-based charging management services, and high availability through remote monitoring.”

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